Chełmno extermination camp

Monument to victims of Nazi extermination camp Kulmhof (Chełmno) in occupied Poland, unveiled in 1990 at the site of the camp
Chełmno on the map of Nazi extermination camps marked with black and white skulls, Poland's borders before World War II

Chełmno extermination camp, known to the Germans as the Kulmhof concentration camp, was a Nazi Germanextermination camp situated 50 kilometres (31 mi) from Łódź, near the Polish village of Chełmno nad Nerem (Kulmhof an der Nehr in German). After the invasion of Poland in 1939 Germany annexed the area as part of the new territory of Reichsgau Wartheland aiming at its complete "Germanization". The camp was set up specifically for that process. It operated from 01941-12-08-0000December 8, 1941 to 01943-04-11-0000April 11, 1943 during Aktion Reinhard (the most deadly phase of the Holocaust), and from 01944-06-23-0000June 23, 1944 to 01945-01-18-0000January 18, 1945 during the Soviet counter-offensive. It was built to exterminate Jews of the Łódź Ghetto and the local Polish inhabitants of Reichsgau Wartheland (Warthegau).[4] In 1943 modifications were made to the camp's killing methods, as the reception building was already dismantled.[5]

At a very minimum 152,000 people (Bohn) were killed in the camp,[3] though the West German prosecution citing Nazi figures during the Chełmno Trials of 1962–65, laid charges for at least 180,000 Jews murdered there.[6] The Polish estimates in the early postwar period suggested a great deal more, up to a total of 340,000 victims, the vast majority of whom were Jews.[4] The murdered came chiefly from Łódź and the surrounding area, along with Romani from Greater Poland. But Jews from Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Germany, Luxemburg, and Austria were also transported to Chelmno via the Łódź Ghetto, and Soviet prisoners of war were killed there. The camp killed most of the victims by the use of gas vans. It was a center for early experimentation and development of methods of mass murder, some of which were applied in later phases of the Holocaust.[7]

One of the camp survivors testified that only three Jewish males had escaped the Chełmno extermination camp successfully; he was fifteen years old.[8] The Holocaust Encyclopedia noted that seven escaped from work details during the early 1940s; among them was Yakov Grojanowski, who documented the camp's operations in his Grojanowski Report. But he was later captured and killed at another death camp before war's end.[3] In June 1945 two survivors testified at a trial of captured camp personnel in Łódź, Poland. The three best-known survivors testified about their Chełmno experiences at the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Two also testified at the camp personnel trials conducted in 1962–65 by West Germany.[8]

Setting up the extermination camp at Chełmno was initiated by the Governor (Reichsstatthalter) of the Reichsgau Wartheland, Arthur Greiser. In a letter to Himmler dated 30 May 1942, Greiser referred to an authorisation he had received from him and Reinhard Heydrich, to start the Sonderbehandlung (Special Handling, i.e. mass killing without judicial process)[9] of 100,000 Jews, about one-third of the total Jewish population of the Wartheland territory. The letter stated that the process of killing those Jews was expected to be completed very soon. One theory is that Greiser's request arose from the German Government's decision of October 1941 to deport German Jews to the Łódź Ghetto (Litzmannstadt) in central Poland. Greiser wanted to create space for the incoming German Jews by killing off part of the existing Polish Jewish population.[9]

According to post-war testimony by the Higher SS and Police Leader for Reichsgau Wartheland, SS General Wilhelm Koppe, he received an order from Himmler to liaise with Reichsstatthalter Greiser to carry out the Sonderbehandlung requested by the latter. Koppe entrusted the extermination operation to SS-StandartenführerErnst Damzog, Commander of Security Police and SD from the headquarters in occupied Poznań (Posen). Damzog personally selected staff for the killing centre and later supervised its daily operation.[10] Damzog formed an SS-Sonderkommando (special detachment) commanded by SS Captain Herbert Lange who was appointed the first camp commander.[10] Lange had previous experience with mass killing of Poles in the Wartheland region (Wielkopolska) during the Euthanasia Aktion of mid-1940, when his forces used a mobile gas-chamber (Einsatzwagen) as well as shooting other victims. In October 1941, Lange toured the area looking for a suitable site for an extermination centre, and finally chose Chełmno (Kulmhof) because of the estate. He was the first commander of forces at the camp.[11]

The killing center consisted of a vacated manorial estate in the town of Chełmno and a large forest clearing about 4 km (2.5 mi) northwest of Chełmno, off the east side of the road to Koło and abutting the village of Rzuchów to the south. These sites were known respectively as the Schlosslager (manor-house camp) and the Waldlager (forest camp).[12] On the grounds of the estate was a large two-story brick country house called "the palace."[13] Its rooms were adapted to use as the reception offices, including rooms for the victims to undress and to give up their valuables. The SS and police staff and guards were housed in other buildings in the town. The Germans had a high wooden fence built around the manor house and the grounds. The clearing in the forest camp, which contained space for mass graves, was likewise fenced off. The camp consisted of three parts: an administration section, barracks and storage for plundered goods; and a burial and cremation site.[14]

A model of Magirus-Deutzgas van used by the Nazis for suffocation at the Chelmno extermination camp; the exhaust fumes were diverted into the sealed rear compartment where the victims were locked in. This particular van had not been modified yet, as noted in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (1946),[15] but it demonstrates the method

The SS-Sonderkommando "Lange" was supplied with three gas vans, assigned by the RSHA in Berlin, for killing mass numbers of victims. These vehicles had been converted to mobile gas-chambers by the use of sealed compartments installed on the chassis, into which the engine exhaust was directed by an attached pipe. The exhaust gases contain large amounts of carbon monoxide, which kills by asphyxia in combining with haemoglobin in the blood to form a very stable compound, carboxyhaemoglobin. The victim is thereby deprived of life-giving oxygen. The Germans had first used carbon monoxide to murder mental patients in Action T4, so had some experience of its efficacy. The Germans had used such vans successfully in September 1941 to kill mental patients in the occupied Soviet Union. For all practical purposes, the extermination by mobile gas vans proved very efficient. On 01942-06-05-0000June 5, 1942 inspector Becker wrote to Obersturmbannfuhrer Rauff in RSHA that, by using just three vans on the Eastern Front (the Opel-Blitz and the larger Saurerwagen), without any faults, they were able to "process" 97,000 captives in less than six months between December 1941 and June 1942.[7]

The rank and file of the so-called SS Special Detachment Lange was made up of Gestapo, Criminal Police, and Order Police personnel, under the leadership of Security Police and SD officers. Herbert Lange was replaced as camp commandant in March (or April) 1942 by Schultze. He was succeeded by SS-Captain Hans Bothmann, who formed and led the Special Detachment Bothmann. The maximum strength of each Special Detachment was just under 100 men, of whom around 80 belonged to the Order Police. The local SS also maintained a "paper command" of the camps Allgemeine-SS inspectorate, to which most of the Chełmno camp staff were attached for administrative purposes. Historians do not believe members of the 120th SS-Standarte office established in Chełmno performed any duties at the camp.[7][16]

The SS and police began killing operations at Chełmno on 01941-12-08-0000December 8, 1941.[17] The first people transported to the camp were the Jewish and Romany populations of Koło, Dąbie, Sompolno, Kłodawa, Babiak, Izbica Kujawska, Bugaj, Nowiny Brdowskie and Kowale Pańskie.[3][18] A total of 3,830 Jews and around 4,000 Gypsies were killed by gas before February 1942.[16] First, the victims were brought from all over Landkreis Warthbrücken to Powiercie by rail. Using whips, the Nazis marched them toward the river near Zawadki, where they were locked overnight in a mill, without food or water. The next morning, they were loaded onto lorries and taken to Chełmno. They were transferred to vans and gassed to death with the exhaust fumes on the way to the burial pits in the forest. The daily average for the camp was about 6 to 9 van-loads of the dead. The drivers used gas-masks.[16][17] From January 1942 the transports included hundreds of Poles and Soviet prisoners of war. In addition, they included Jews from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia and Luxemburg, who had first been deported to the ghetto in Łódź, a railroad hub, where they had been subsiding for some time.[3] One of the sisters of author Franz Kafka, Valeria Pollakova (born 1890) was sent to the Łódź Ghetto from Prague on September 10, 1942, her last known destination. She may have been gassed at Chełmno or died in the ghetto before that.[19]

In late February 1942, the secretary of the local Polish council in Chełmno, Stanisław Kaszyński (b. 1903), was arrested for trying to bring public attention to what was being perpetrated at the camp. He was interrogated and executed three days later on February 28, 1942 by the church along with his wife. His secret communiqué was intercepted by the SS-Sonderkommando.[20] Today, there is an obelisk to his memory at Chełmno, erected on 01991-08-07-0000August 7, 1991.[21]

Chelmno extermination camp did not have direct rail connections. Jews were delivered by train to Koło, then to nearby Powiercie, and in overcrowded lorries to camp. They were forced to abandon their bundles along the way. At the manor house in Chełmno they were compelled to undress for transport to a bath, unaware that it was the final stage of their lives. In this photo, loading of victims sent from the ghetto in Łódź

During the first five weeks, the murder victims came from the nearby areas.[3] They were transported to the manor house (Schlosslager) in Chełmno under the guard of Special Detachment called SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof commanded by Herbert Lange. The victims, mostly Jews, disembarked at the courtyard and entered the manor house, where the SS men, wearing white coats and pretending to be medics, waited for them with a translator released from the Gestapo prison in Poznań.[1] The deportees were told to undress for bathing, and to have their clothes disinfected before transport to Germany and Austria. Occasionally they were met by a German officer dressed as a local squire with a feather hat, announcing that some of them would remain there.[22]

The Jews were led to a special room to strip and hand over their valuables.[3] They were told that all hidden banknotes would be destroyed during steaming and needed to be taken out and handed over for safe-keeping. Wearing just underwear, with the women allowed to keep slips on,[18] they were taken to the cellar and across the ramp into the back of a gas van holding from 50-70 people each (Opel Blitz) and up to 150 (Magirus). When the van was full, the doors were shut and the engine started, pumping fumes into the rear compartment.[15] After about 5–10 minutes, the victims were killed by asphyxiation. Witnesses heard their screams as they were dying. The vans full of corpses were driven 4 km (2.5 mi) to the forest Waldlager camp, to previously excavated mass graves. The vans were unloaded and cleaned by the Waldkommando, and then returned to the loading dock at the manor house.[3]

On January 16, 1942, the SS and police began deportations from the Łódź Ghetto (Litzmannstadt). German officials transported the Jews from Łódź by train to Koło railway station, six miles (10 km) northwest of Chełmno. There, the SS and police personnel supervised transfer of the Jews from the freight as well as passenger trains,[23] to smaller-size cargo trains running on a narrow-gauge track, which took them from Koło to the Powiercie station,[24] three miles (5 km) northwest of Chełmno. Beginning in late July 1942, the victims were brought to the camp directly after the regular railway line linking Koło with Dąbie was restored; the bridge over the Rgilewka River had been repaired.[25]

As round-ups in Łódź normally took place in the morning, it was usually late afternoon by the time the victims arrived by rail. Therefore they were marched to a disused mill at Zawadki some two kilometres from Powiercie where they spent the night. The mill continued to be used after the railway repairs, if transports arrived late.[26] The following morning the Jews were transported from Zawadki by truck, in numbers which could be easily controlled at their destination point. They were "processed" immediately upon arrival at the manor-house camp.[27]

German staff selected young Jewish prisoners from incoming transports to join the camp Sonderkommando, a special unit of 50 to 60 men deployed at the forest burial camp. They removed corpses from the gas-vans and placed them in mass graves. The large trenches were quickly filled, but the smell of decomposing bodies began to permeate the surrounding countryside including nearby villages. In the spring of 1942, the SS ordered burning of the bodies in the forest. The bodies were cremated on open air grids constructed of concrete slabs and rail tracks; pipes were used for air ducts, and long ash pans were built below the grid.[28] Later, the Jewish Sonderkommando had to exhume the mass graves and burn the previously interred bodies. In addition, they sorted the clothing of the victims, and cleaned the excrement and blood from the vans.[3]

A small detachment of about 15 Jews worked at the manor house, sorting and packing the belongings of the victims. Between eight and ten skilled craftsmen worked there to produce or repair goods for the SS Special Detachment.[5][29]

A remnant of the open-air mass cremation structure at the forest camp, with memorial plaque

Periodically, the SS executed the members of the Jewish special detachment and replaced them with workers selected from recent transports. The SS held jumping contests and races among the prisoners, who were shackled with chains on their ankles, to deem who was fit to continue working. The losers of such contests were shot.[5]

The early killing process carried out by the SS from December 8, 1941 until mid January 1942, was intended to kill Jews and Poles from all nearby towns and villages, which were slated for German colonization (Lebensraum). From mid-January 1942, the SS and Order Police began transporting Jews in crowded freight and passenger trains from Łódź.[23] By then, Jews had also been deported to Łódź from Germany, Bohemia-Moravia, and Luxembourg, and were included in the transports at that time. The transports included most of the 5,000 Roma (Gypsies) who had been deported from Austria. Throughout 1942, the Jews from Wartheland were still being processed; in March 1943 the SS declared the district judenfrei. Other victims murdered at the killing center included several hundred Poles, and Soviet prisoners of war.[30]

During the summer of 1942, the new commandant Bothmann made substantial changes to the camp's killing methods. The change was prompted by two incidents in March and April of that year. First, the gas-van broke down on the highway while full of living victims. Many passers-by heard their loud cries. Soon after that, the Saurer van exploded while the driver was revving its engine at the loading ramp; the gassing compartment was full of living Jews. The explosion blew off the locked back door, and badly burned the victims inside. Drivers were replaced. Bothmann's modifications to the killing methods included adding poison to gasoline. There is evidence that some red powder and a fluid were delivered from Germany by Maks Sado freight company, in order to kill the victims more quickly. Another major change involved parking the gas vans while prisoners were killed. They were no longer driven en route to the forest cremation area with living victims inside.[31]

After having annihilated almost all Jews of Wartheland District, in March 1943 the Germans closed the Chełmno killing centre, while Operation Reinhard was still underway elsewhere. Other death camps had faster methods of killing and incinerating people. Chełmno was not a part of Reinhard. The SS ordered complete demolition of Schlosslager, along with the manor house, which was levelled. To hide the evidence of the SS-committed war crimes, from 1943 onward, the Germans ordered the exhumation of all remains and burning of bodies in open-air cremation pits by a unit of Sonderkommando 1005.[2][30] The bones were crushed on cement with mallets and added to the ashes. These were transported every night in sacks made of blankets to river Warta (or to the Ner River) on the other side of Zawadka, where they were dumped into the water from a bridge and from a flat-bottomed boat.[32] Eventually, the camp authorities bought a bone-crushing machine (Knochenmühle) from Schriever and Co. in Hamburg to speed up the process.[33]

On 01944-06-23-0000June 23, 1944,[2] in spite of earlier demolitions, the SS renewed gassing operations at Chełmno in order to complete the liquidation of the remaining 70,000 Jewish prisoners of the Łódź ghetto, producing war supplies for the Germans.[2] The Special Detachment "Bothmann" returned to the forest and resumed killing operations at a smaller camp, consisting of brand new wooden barracks along with new pyres.[34]

First, the new victims were taken to the church building in Chełmno where they were ordered to leave their bundles behind. They were driven to the forest, where the camp authorities had constructed two fenced-out reception barracks for undressing, and two new open-air cremation pits further up. The SS and police guarded the victims as they took off their clothes and gave up valuables before entering gas-vans. In this final phase of the camp operation, some 25,000 Jews were murdered. Their bodies were burned immediately after death. From mid-July 1944, the SS and police began deporting the remaining inhabitants of the Łódź ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau.[34]

In September 1944, the SS brought in a new Commando 1005 of Jewish prisoners from outside the Wartheland District to exhume and cremate remaining corpses and to remove evidence of the mass murder operations. A month later, the SS executed about half of the 80-man detachment after most of the work was done. The gas vans were sent back to Berlin. The remaining Jewish workers were executed just before the German retreat from the Chełmno killing center on January 18, 1945, as the Soviet army approached (it reached the camp two days later). The 15-year-old Jewish prisoner Simon Srebnik was the only one to survive the last executions with a gunshot wound to the head.[3] Historians estimate that the SS killed at least 152,000–180,000 people at Chełmno between December 1941 and March 1943, and from 01944-06-23-0000June 23, 1944 until the Soviet advance.[3] Note: a 1946–47 report by the Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland (IPN) placed the number closer to 340,000 based on a statistical approach, as the camp authorities had destroyed all waybills in an effort to hide their actions.[4]

After the war, some Chełmno extermination camp personnel were tried in Poland as well as in other court cases spanning a period of about 20 years. The first judicial trial of the former members of the SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof took place in 1945 at the District Court in Łódź. The subsequent four trials, held in Bonn, began in 1962 and concluded three years later in 1965 in Cologne.[31]

Adolf Eichmann testified about the camp during his 1961 war-crimes trial in Jerusalem. He visited it once in late 1942. Simon Srebnik, from the burial Sonderkommando, testified in both the Chelmno Guard and Eichmann trials. Nicknamed Spinnefix at the camp, Srebnik was recognised by the Chelmno Guards only by this moniker. Walter Burmeister, a gas-van driver (not to be confused with the camp's SS-UnterscharfuehrerWalter Burmeister), testified in Bonn in 1967:[35]

As soon as the ramp had been erected in the castle, people started arriving in Kulmhof from Litzmannstadt (Łódź) in lorries... The people were told that they had to take a bath, that their clothes had to be disinfected and that they could hand in any valuable items beforehand to be registered...

When they had undressed they were sent to the cellar of the castle and then along a passageway on to the ramp and from there into the gas-van. In the castle there were signs marked "to the baths". The gas vans were large vans, about 4-5 metres [13-16 ft] long, 2.2 metres [7.2 ft] wide and 2 metres [6.5 ft] high. The interior walls were lined with sheet metal. A wooden grille was set into the floor. The floor of the van had an opening which could be connected to the exhaust by means of a removable metal pipe. When the lorries were full of people, the double doors at the back were closed and the exhaust connected to the interior of the van...

The commando member detailed as driver started the engine right away so that the people inside the lorry were suffocated by the exhaust gases. Once this had taken place, the union between the exhaust and the inside of the lorry was disconnected and the van was driven to the camp in the woods where the bodies were unloaded. In the early days they were initially buried in mass graves, later incinerated... I then drove the van back to the castle and parked it there. Here it would be cleaned of the excretions of the people that had died in it. Afterwards it would once again be used for gassing.

According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, a total of seven Jews from the burial Sonderkommando escaped from the Waldlager.[3] Determining the identities of the few survivors of Chełmno had presented ambiguity because records use different versions of their names. One survivor may not have been recorded in the early postwar years because he did not testify at trials of camp personnel. Five escaped during the winter of 1942, including Mordechaï Podchlebnik, Milnak Meyer, Abraham Tauber, Abram Roj, and Szlamek Bajler (whose identity was later established as Yakov (or Jacob) Grojanowski). Mordechaï Zurawski and Simon Srebnik escaped later.[3] Srebnik was among Jews shot by the Germans two days before the Russians entered Chelmno, but he survived.[37]Yakov (or Jacob) Grojanowski wrote about the operations of the camp in his Grojanowski Report. But Grojanowski was captured and murdered in the gas chamber at Bełżec extermination camp before the end of the war. Other of the escapees who have not been documented since the postwar period likely died during the war.

In June 1945, both Podchlebnik and Srebnik, then age fifteen, testified at a trial in Łódź, Poland of camp personnel. In addition to being included in the Holocaust Encyclopedia list, Mordechaï Zurawski is included as a survivor in three other sources[8][38][39] each of which documents his testifying, along with Srebnik and Podchlebnik, about his experience at Chełmno at the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. In addition, Srebnik testified in the Chelmno Guard Trials of 1962/3.[40] The French director Claude Lanzmann included interviews with Srebnik and Podchlebnik in his documentary Shoah, referring to them as the only two Jewish survivors of Chełmno, but he was in error. Some sources repeat that only Simon Srebnik and Mordechaï Podchlebnik survived the war but these are in error.[41][42] Podchlebnik is sometimes referred to as Michał (or Michael), in Polish and English versions of his name.[42]

In 2002 Dr. Sara Roy of Harvard University wrote that her father, Abraham, was one of "two survivors" of Chełmno.[43][44] Her father is the "Abram Roj" noted as an escapee by the Holocaust Encyclopedia, as Abram/Avram stands for Abraham, and Roj appears to have been transliterated or anglicized to Roy. She was mistaken about the total number of survivors.

^ abcdefghijklmUSHMM (May 11, 2012). "Chelmno" (permission granted to be reused, in whole or in part, on Wikipedia; OTRS ticket no. 2007071910012533 confirmed). Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. Retrieved May 12, 2013. Text from USHMM has been released under the GFDL. The website can offer no guarantee that the information is correct in each circumstance.

^Alan Heath (Sep 16, 2007), The Nazi Death Camp at Chełmno nad Nerem on YouTube (about razed manor house). Narration by the author. Retrieved May 9, 2013. Alan Heath is a British publisher, writer and Holocaust historian specialising in Nazi death camps. He is the author of a series of video essays about the German killing factories in Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek and Auschwitz. In March 2007, Heath accompanied Holocaust denier David Irving on a tour of the death camps in Poland.

Holocaust Encyclopedia. "Chełmno" (permission granted to be reused, in whole or in part, on Wikipedia; OTRS ticket no. 2007071910012533 confirmed). United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 5 August 2007. Retrieved 26 July 2007. Text from USHMM has been released under the GFDL. The website can offer no guarantee that the information is correct in each circumstance.